Why Low Bounce Rate is Great

Bounce Rate in your Web Analytics

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who left your site – without navigating beyond the page they landed on.

If you had 1,000 visitors to your website on Monday, and 400 left after viewing one page and 600 visited more than one page, then your site’s bounce rate was 40% that day. The more visitors who navigate beyond one page, the lower your website’s bounce rate!

The standard Bounce Rate metric is based on the number of visitors who ONLY visited one page of your website and then left. Some web analytics programs base this number on visitors who left your site after a certain time period, say 30 or 60 seconds. Other programs give you the option of selecting how your bounce rate is calculated. Frankly, many of us happy clickers can whip through pages and digest information in less than 30 seconds to look up company phone numbers, download a map or directions, look up a store’s hours, check showtimes or even print an interesting article to read at our leisure. While MOST web analytics tools use one-page visits as their default metric to measure bounced traffic statistics, verify your analytic tools so you know for sure.

Well-designed websites actually help users quickly navigate and find what they need. If that’s the norm for your visitors, good for you! Either way, just be aware of how your visitors’ behaviors’ impact your bounce rate.
 

What’s Normal?

How to Improve Bounce Rate

You’ll best accomplish this by helping users easily discover what’s beyond this page. How else would they know that there’s more good stuff just around the corner?

The best place to begin is looking at the individual bounce rate for each of your web pages. Because each page carries its own bounce rate metric, pages with higher bounce rates should be assessed first. Another set of metrics to check are your top landing pages and flag any of those with higher bounce rates.

Another useful insight: Check the “average time spent” on each page. Short time, bad. A minute or more, good.

As you look at each high-bounced page, ask yourself:

Want Totally Awesome Bounce Rates?

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